# What is Stella (Previously Alpha Finance Lab) (ALPHA)?
Stella is the leveraged strategies protocol with 0% cost to borrow. Stella’s mission is to redefine how leveraged DeFi works. DeFi needs a good leverage system in order to drive more usages on DEXes and money markets, the fundamental building blocks of DeFi. With growing usages on these fundamentals, more protocols and new innovations can arise and tap into the deep liquidity and robust foundation. 

Stella strives to become the go-to destination for DeFi users to access maximum yield potential. Whatever on-chain strategies that users want to use on leverage (and safe enough to be supported), then Stella will support at 0% cost to borrow. 

The protocol is made up of two parts: Stella Strategy and Stella Lend. 
* Stella Strategy: Users can access multiple selections of leveraged strategies with 0% borrowing interest for the first time and get yields on leverage. 

* Stella Lend: Lenders can lend assets to the lending pools on Stella and get real yields. Yields generated from Stella Strategy are shared to lenders.

# Who Are the Core Development Team of Stella?
1. Tascha Punyaneramitdee: Project Lead
Former Head of Strategy at Band Protocol, Product Manager at Tencent, and Investment Banking Analyst at Jefferies.
2. Nipun Pitimanaaree: Tech Lead
Former Chief Research Officer at OZT Robotics.
3. Arin Trongsantipong: Product Lead
Former Software Engineer at SCB 10X, SCBC and Cleverse.

# What Makes Stella Unique?
* Stella Strategy enables users to increase their positions by borrowing funds from Stella Lend at 0% cost. This results in larger position sizes, leading to higher yields from trading fees, token rewards, or price exposure.

Unlike traditional accruing borrow interest from utilization-based IRM, users at Stella pays 0% borrow interest. Stella adopts a Pay-As-You-Earn (PAYE) model. When a leveraged position is closed with a positive yield, a portion of the net yield is deducted as a fee for the borrowed liquidity from Stella Lend. 

* Stella Lend serves as a platform for users seeking to lend assets and passively earn APY through in-kind token rewards without putting a maximum cap on the lending APY. Users from Stella Strategy can borrow these lent assets to open leveraged positions. The yields generated by borrowers are shared to lenders in the form of lending APY as a result of Stella’s Pay-As-You-Earn (PAYE) model.

# How Many Stella (ALPHA) Coins Are There in Circulation?
The ALPHA token is the native token of Stella. The token was initially launched with a circulating supply of 174.1 million tokens out of a total of 1 billion ALPHA.

According to Binance’s Stella paper, the total supply of ALPHA tokens is allocated as follows:

Binance Launchpad Sale: 10.00% of the total token supply
Binance Launchpool: 5.00% of the total token supply
Private Sale: 13.33% of the total token supply
Liquidity Mining: 20.00% of the total token supply
Team & Advisors: 15.00% of the total token supply
Ecosystem: 36.67% of the total token supply
Team tokens are locked until August 2021 and will be fully vested by March 2024.
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# How Is the Stella Network Secured?
As an ERC-20 token, ALPHA is backed by one of the most robust and secure blockchain networks in popular usage — Ethereum. It is kept secure by its extensive proof-of-work (POW) mining network, which uses an army of dedicated miners to maintain the integrity of the network.

Although Stella has dedicated developers and researchers, it also relies on external audits to ensure its smart contracts are secure. Stella is in the last phase of finalizing its smart contract audit with PeckShield and is also currently working with Trust 90 (tentative to complete on June 1, 2023). 

Please check our [Gitbook](https://docs.stellaxyz.io/) for updated information on our audit progress.

# What can Stella (ALPHA) token holders do?
The value captured and accrued in the Stella ecosystem will be distributed to ALPHA stakers. ALPHA stakers will receive the following upon staking: 
Protocol fees from Stella protocol, regardless of which chains or layer-2 solutions Stella is built on.
Tokens of the past incubated projects when the tokens become available publicly. This allows stakers to take part in high-quality projects early on.
Voting rights on protocol’s proposals to participate in Stella governance.

# Community
[Discord](https://discord.stellaxyz.io/)
[Twitter](https://twitter.stellaxyz.io/)
[Telegram](https://telegram.stellaxyz.io/)
[Medium](https://blog.stellaxyz.io/)

# Appendix
[Website](https://stellaxyz.io/)
[Documentation
](https://docs.stellaxyz.io/)
[Explorer (ERC20)](https://etherscan.io/token/0xa1faa113cbe53436df28ff0aee54275c13b40975)
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Stella

Ledger

Trust Wallet

MetaMask

Binance Chain Wallet

Atomic wallet

Ethereum

Shiba Inu

Chainlink

UNUS SED LEO

Uniswap

BitMart Token

Goldfinch

Dogelon Mars

Nexera

Orchid

Tokenlon Network Token

Victoria VR

LeverFi

Tokamak Network

Wall Street Baby

Houdini Swap

StakeWise Staked ETH

Gaga (Pepe)

Open Platform

DODO is a DeFi protocoldecentralized finance (DeFi) protocol and on-chain liquidity provider whose unique proactive market maker (PMM) algorithm aims to offer better liquidity and price stability than automated market makers (AMM).

The PMM pricing mechanism, which mimics human trading, utilizes oracles to gather highly accurate market prices for assets. It then provides enough liquidity close to these prices in order to stabilize the portfolios of liquidity providers (LP), lower price slippage and negate impermanent loss by allowing arbitrage trading as reward.

DODO also caters for new crypto projects with a free ICO listing through its Initial DODO Offering (IDO) which requires issuers to only deposit their own tokens.

DODO’s smart contract operates as an ERC20 token on the Ethereum network.

DODO

Band Protocol is a cross-chain data oracle platform that is able to take real-world data and supply it to on-chain applications, while also connecting APIs to smart-contracts to facilitate the exchange of information between on-chain and off-chain data sources.

By supplying reputable, verifiable real-world data to blockchains, Band Protocol unlocks a range of new use cases for developers to explore — since they can now use any type of real-world data as part of their decentralized application (DApp) logic, including sports, weather, random numbers, price feed data and more.

Band Protocol initially launched as an ERC-20 project on the Ethereum blockchain in September 2019, but transitioned to the Cosmos network in June 2020 with the release of Band Protocol 2.0. The new protocol is built on BandChain using the Cosmos SDK. Oracle nodes on BandChain not only relay data but are also involved in block production/validation, giving them a dual role.

BAND is the native token of the Band Protocol ecosystem and is used as collateral by validators involved in fulfilling data requests, as well as the main medium of exchange on BandChain — being used to paying for private data.

Band Protocol

Badger DAO is an open-source, decentralized automated organization that is dedicated to building products and infrastructure of simplifying the use of Bitcoin (BTC) as collateral across many smart contract platforms.

The platform is a shared space where the developers, known as Badge Builders, have the ability to collaborate and implement Bitcoin as collateral to as many blockchains as possible. A developer can earn a percentage of the fees and BADGER tokens from the developer mining pool for every implementation. The mainnet was launched on December 3, 2020.

A builder can be a single developer, a group of developers, or even a company. There are no fixed obligations to participation requirements, and anyone can create. The pillars of Badger DAO include the Badger Builders, the community-created products, the Dedicated Badger Operations team, the fairly initial distribution of the BADGER tokens for governance and the fact that all of the code is open-sourced.

Badger DAO

Linear is a decentralized delta-one asset protocol capable of instantly creating synthetic assets with unlimited liquidity. The project opens traditional assets like commodities, forex, market indices and other thematic sectors to cryptocurrency users by supporting the creation of “Liquids” — Linear’s synthetic asset tokens.

The protocol consists of various products like Linear.Buildr, a DApp used to manage Liquids using Linear (LINA) and other tokens as collateral. The exchange is specifically created to enable trading of a variety of Liquids with rapid confirmation times and robust security.

LINA is an ERC-20 token built on the Ethereum network whose main purpose is as collateral for Liquids (using Buildr) and for community governance of the protocol. All token holders have access to the Linear DAO, enabling them to vote on different initiatives and proposals, helping to shape the development of the Linear ecosystem.

The main goal of Linear is to provide a superior user experience with better scalability and greater speed thanks to the cross-chain capabilities of the protocol. Linear Finance intends to provide a simple solution for users that want exposure to traditional assets while still benefiting from the features enabled only by blockchain technology.

Linear Finance

Venus is an algorithmic money market and synthetic stablecoin protocol launched exclusively on Binance Smart Chain (BSC).

The protocol introduces a simple-to-use crypto asset lending and borrowing solution to the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, enabling users to directly borrow against collateral at high speed while losing less to transaction fees. In addition, Venus allows users to mint VAI stablecoins on-demand within seconds by posting at least 200% collateral to the Venus smart contract.

VAI tokens are synthetic BEP-20 token assets that are pegged to the value of one U.S. dollar (USD), whereas XVS tokens are also BEP-20-based, but are instead used for governance of the Venus protocol, and can be used to vote on adjustments—including adding new collateral types, changing parameters and organizing product improvements.

The governance of the protocol is entirely controlled by XVS community members, since the Venus founders, team members and other advisors do have any XVS token allocations.

Venus

Reef is a Reliable Extensible Efficient Fast Layer-1 Blockchain for DeFi, NFT & Gaming. Built using Substrate Framework, it provides high scalability, enabling almost instant low-cost transactions, and supports Solidity and EVM, allowing developers to seamlessly migrate their DApps from Ethereum without any change in the codebase.

Reef Chain is the most advanced EVM-compatible blockchain. It's self-upgradable and has on-chain governance. Its infrastructure also allows for EVM extensions which allows for native token bridge, scheduled calls (ie. recurring payments), and smart contract in-place code upgrades. In the near future, it will support additional VMs which will allow developers to write code in multiple programming languages. The network runs on a Nominated Proof-of-Stake (NPoS) consensus mechanism, which offers scalability and low fees.

REEF is the native token that is used for:

Fees for processing transactions and storing data.

Running validator nodes by staking REEF tokens.

Nominating which validator nodes should be part of the network.

Reef is backed by multiple leading funds and venture capitalists including NGC, QCP, Bitcoin.com, Kenetic Capital, LD Capital, TRG Capital, Krypital Group, Genesis Block, Woodstock Fund and others.

Reef Chain development tools include:

Remix and EVM integrated development environments for uploading and deploying smart contracts.

Reefscan blockchain explorer to assist with deploying validators, bonding and nominating validators, debugging contracts, and understanding network performance.

Reef command line tools that allow developers deploy applications from local environments.

Reef wallet for accessing and interacting with the blockchain

Reef

Bella Protocol is a platform that provides a suite of DeFi products designed to make crypto banking simpler and more accessible. The protocol aims to create a better user experience by eliminating the high fee and slow transaction issues that can affect some blockchain platforms — while simultaneously improving the user experience through its simplified DeFi smart portal.

Bella's smart pool feature allows users to access the best yields available in the DeFi market, while benefiting from nearly zero gas fees — since these are directly subsidized by the platform.

The project launched in September 2020 as the first project distributed via Binance’s Launchpool platform, and has secured investments from several prominent firms, including Arrington XRP Capital and Ledger Capital.

The protocol was built by the ARPA team, a blockchain-based layer 2 solution for privacy-preserving computation. The BEL token is an essential component of the Bella Protocol ecosystem and serves as both a reward token that allows holders to participate in the governance of the platform.

BEL can be used to farm fee rewards from the network, get exclusive discounts on Bella protocol products (such as its robo-advisor tool), and for earning staking rewards.

Bella Protocol

Celer is a blockchain interoperability
protocol enabling a one-click user experience accessing tokens, DeFi, GameFi, NFTs, governance, and more across multiple chains. Developers can build inter-chain-native Dapps using the Celer Inter-chain Messaging Framework to gain access to efficient liquidity utilization, coherent application logic, and shared states. Users of Celer-enabled dApps will enjoy the benefits of a diverse multi-blockchain ecosystem with the simplicity of a single-transaction UX, all from a single chain.

Celer Network

My Neighbor Alice is a farming-themed play-to-earn builder game built on Chromia. The game bills itself as a place where “players can buy and own virtual islands, collect and build exciting items while also making new friends.” Each player has their own avatar representing them in the game, which they can modify as they please. Players can buy virtual real estate from Alice, the game’s eponymous central figure, or the internal marketplace. All purchased land is represented as an NFT.

My Neighbor Alice aims to introduce blockchain to millions of players and targets a diverse gaming community within the traditional gaming market. Although the game is blockchain-based and integrates DeFi features, it does not require prior knowledge of cryptocurrency and blockchain. My Neighbor Alice takes inspiration from several popular sources. For instance, daily in-game tasks and social aspects are inspired by Animal Crossing, whereas Minecraft serves as a role model for building mechanics. The artwork was inspired by the Swedish children’s book Pettson and Findus.

MyNeighborAlice

Chromia is a modular, relational blockchain platform that aims to make it easy for people to build decentralized applications (DApps). It was founded by ChromaWay, a company that has been working on blockchain solutions since 2014 for various sectors such as finance, real estate, gaming and public services. ChromaWay is also known for creating colored coins, which are user-defined assets on a blockchain that can represent anything from currencies to stocks to collectibles.

Chromia’s vision is to enable a new generation of DApps that can scale beyond what is currently possible and address real-world problems in various domains such as gaming, social media, finance, healthcare, education, governance, and more.

Some examples of DApps on Chromia include: My Neighbor Alice (ALICE), a multiplayer blockchain game; LAC PropertyChain, a land registry system; Green Assets Wallet, a platform for green bond verification; Hedget (HGET),  a decentralized options protocol; Corite (CO), a music streaming service; Chain of Alliance (COA), a strategy game; Vault12, a digital asset custody solution; Domenation, a blockchain gaming project.

Chromia

Flamingo is a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform based on the Neo blockchain and the Poly Network interoperability protocol. It combines several DeFi applications into a single ecosystem: a cross-blockchain asset gateway (wrapper), an on-blockchain liquidity pool (swap), a blockchain asset vault, a perpetual contract trading platform (perp) and a decentralized governance organization (DAO).

Different components of the Flamingo network are planned to be launched in several phases:

Token wrapper for Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDT, Neo, Ontology and others: September 23, 2020

Swap and LP token staking: September 30, 2020

Phase 3 vault launch and stablecoin issuance: October 28, 2020

Perp launch: November 25, 2020

DAO launch: December 23, 2020

Flamingo

Ontology is a project designed to bring trust, privacy, and security to Web3 through decentralized identity and data solutions. It is building the infrastructure to provide trusted access to Web3, allowing individuals and enterprises to rest assured that through regulatory compliant digital identity solutions, users and their privacy come first.

The Ontology blockchain is a high speed, low cost public blockchain. It is designed to bring decentralized identity and data solutions to Web3, with the goal of increasing privacy, transparency, and trust. To achieve this, users and enterprises are provided with the flexibility to build blockchain-based solutions that suit their needs, while also ensuring regulatory compliance. Through Ontology’s Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), Ontology ensures frictionless compatibility with Ethereum, the first step in the creation of the Ontology Multi-Virtual Machine and further interoperability for the chain.

At its launch, Ontology chose to forego the popular initial coin offering (ICO) model in favor of a series of community distributions and airdrops of its ONT cryptocurrency.

This helped to quickly establish both organic price discovery and a passionate community and helped the project to avoid subsequent regulatory scrutiny.

For example, for a brief period any person who signed up for the Ontology newsletter received an airdrop of free 1,000 ONT, which reached a value of $10 per token soon after the token became listed on major exchanges like Binance.

Ontology launched its own MainNet on June 30, 2018 and has been up and running smoothly since.

Ontology

Ren (REN) is an open protocol built to provide interoperability and liquidity between different blockchain platforms.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Ren.

Formerly known as Republic Protocol, Ren launched RenVM, its virtual machine mainnet, in May 2020, having completed a $34 million initial coin offering (ICO) in 2018.

The protocol’s native token, REN, functions as a bond for those running nodes which power RenVM, known as Darknodes.

Ren aims to expand the interoperability, and hence accessibility, of decentralized finance (DeFi) by removing hurdles involved in liquidity between blockchains.

Origin Protocol develops web3 technologies with the intention of bringing non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralized finance (DeFi) to the masses. The protocol’s unique tooling and diverse partnerships help in realizing these goals. Origin Protocol has two flagship products: Origin Story (governed by OGN), and Origin Dollar (governed by OGV).

Origin Story is a white label NFT marketplace solution that works with disrupters in various sectors by leveraging non-fungible tokens. The platform hosts NFT marketplaces and tooling in various industries, including the real estate, profile picture, music, art and entertainment industries.

Some of Origin Story’s partners include Roofstock onChain, Pudgy Penguins, Sappy Seals, Paris Hilton, 3LAU, BT, Inspiration4, and The Doge Pound. Origin Story Marketplaces seek to cast a wide net in various industries being impacted by NFTs, rather than focusing on any one area in particular. Investors may see OGN as the ‘picks and shovels’ approach to investing in NFTs.

Origin Protocol

Cartesi is an app-specific rollup protocol with a virtual machine that runs Linux distributions, creating a richer and broader design space for DApp developers.

Cartesi Rollups offer a modular scaling solution, deployable as L2, L3, or sovereign rollups, while maintaining strong base layer security guarantees.

Cartesi

Balancer is an automated market maker (AMM) that was developed on the Ethereum blockchain and launched in March 2020. It was able to raise a $3M seed round by Placeholder and Accomplice. Balancer protocol functions as a self-balancing weighted portfolio, price sensor and liquidity provider. It allows users to earn profits through its recently introduced token ($BAL) by contributing to customizable liquidity pools.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Balancer(https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/what-is-balancer.

The protocol operates a few types of pools:

Private pools give the owner governance over the pool, and make the person the sole contributor of liquidity to the pool. Also, all the parameters are mutable by the owner.

Shared pools are for those who want to become liquidity providers (LPs). The LPs are rewarded with the Balancer Pool Tokens (BPTs).

Smart pools are similar to private pools but are controlled by a smart contract. They also reward using BPTs and allow anyone to contribute liquidity to the pool.

Balancer

Perpetual Protocol is a decentralized exchange (DEX) for futures on Ethereum and xDai. Traders can go long or short with up to 10X leverage on a growing number of assets like BTC, ETH, DOT, SNX, YFI and others. Trading is non-custodial, meaning traders always retain possession of their assets, and on-chain. Perpetual Protocol utilizes a virtual automated market maker (vAMM), which provides on-chain liquidity with predictable pricing set by constant product curves. Furthermore, Perpetual Protocol designed its vAMMs to be market-neutral and fully collateralized.

The declared vision of Perpetual Protocol is to create the world’s best, most accessible, and most secure decentralized derivatives trading platform. By building on our DeFi projects and allowing projects to build on Perpetual Protocol, the company embraces the “DeFi money lego” ethos. After hitting a number of milestones in its roadmap, such as launching staking pools and implementing limit and stop-orders, Perpetual Protocol plans to expand to other chains, introduce leveraged tokens, and launch dynamic liquidity in its pools.

Perpetual Protocol

IOST describes itself as an “ultra-fast,” fully fledged and decentralized blockchain network and ecosystem with its own nodes, wallets and based on the “next-generation” consensus protocol dubbed “proof-of-believability.”

IOST

SafePal is a cryptocurrency wallet launched in 2018 that helps users to protect and grow their digital assets. SafePal provides hardware and software wallets, all paired and managed through the SafePal App and was the first hardware wallet invested in and backed by Binance.

SafePal wallet supports numerous popular crypto-assets, in addition to popular tokens on the Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain (BSC)and TRON blockchains. Users can store, manage, swap, trade and grow their portfolio without compromising asset security, according to SafePal.

Since its launch in 2018, SafePal has grown exponentially and has over 3,000,000 users in 196 countries globally. More information can be found in the SafePal Official Website.

SafePal

Launched in 2020, Dego Finance is a decentralized ecosystem that offers a diverse combination of non-fungible token (NFT) and decentralized finance (DeFi) tools. It is an independent, open NFT ecosystem.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Dego Finance.

Any user is allowed to launch an NFT and initiate mining, auctions and trading, covering the entire lifecycle of the product. Dego’s NFT protocol is a cross-chain, second-layer infrastructure for Blockchain projects that can be leveraged for user acquisition and token distribution.

Dego uses a modular combination design concept that combines various elements of a product to form subsystems with specific functions.